Hey Muris!

I just wanted to ask you... Can you recommend me a couple of lessons from here to develop my left hand speed? The thing is that I can be proud of excellent accuracy while playing, but when it comes to shredding or fast scales or notes, I'm not that good


Suggestions please?

edited: sorry didnt see it was directed to muris

Hey, no problem bro, if you can help me too it's ok! The question was directed to Muris because I posted it in his instructor section, but any suggestions are welcome!

Good thing is that you HAVE accuracy,that's most important,tempo is easier part imho.
Now you just play everything you do slowly and adding some speed step by step.
Speed is the matter of time and discipline,so practice hard and heavy.

Since you have left hand issue,I'd suggest some legato stuff + alternate picking of course.

There are tons of great lesson at GMC,just type legato or alt. picking into search field.

The weird thing is that I can be really fast with legato (for example, I got no problem in your Tapping and Legato lesson), but when I have to switch between strings I can't keep the same speed... Kinda' sloppy switch...

I guess my problem is with scale fast picking... Did I make my "defficiency" undesrtandable?

Then go straight to Alternate Picking.
Here is one quite tricky but worth of trying.

muris, i have noticed that i am much faster and cleaner picking down the scales than i am picking up. it is REALLY frusterating! did you ever have this problem?

Course I have.

And reason and simple,you're playing scales down more often than up.
Just switch your routine a bit and focus yourself on playing scales up.
It's strange,we play what feels nice for us and then suddenly get into troubles.

thanks muris. ill get to it right away!

You're welcome,let me know if you need anything else.

hey muris, i have kind of a problem here ,you see ,i'm a left-handed guy playing as a regular one ; that means that i have 0 trouble with my left hand ,but by th other side ,i have tons of problems with my right hand. Ok so ,when i play simple stuff everything is ok and sounds great but when it comes to play advanced stuff my right hand only sticks with me for a moment and after ,it starts to go numb. I REALLY need your help because i have tried many right hand excercises but i cant find the one thats solves my problem. Any suggestions?

Hi there

I see,you must have had tons of problems when it comes to picking,
since you're left handed playing as right handed player.

I would like to few more details tho,per example how long have you played,
how do you hold the pick,position of picking hand etc.

Could you post a small video clip of your playing,some random stuff?
That way I'd be able to give you better suggestion for sure.

I'll pick up where Narguille left off, cause I'm almost in the exact same situation.

I'm left handed and play right handed. I'm not sure if being left handed is the cause, but I do know that I've favored legato styles with lots of hammer-on & pull-off's to get my speed up. I've been playing many years and have gotten by ok with rather poor right handed technique, but I've recently decided that to smooth out my playing, I've got to get better at picking.

Since I've found GMC, I have bookmarked several ap lessons and exercises and have improved somewhat in about two months since I started working hard at it. I'm practicing about two hours a day now. What I've found is that I can play accurately and cleanly up to a point, but once I get past my speed barrier (which is a rather lame 90 bps on most exercises), my hand and arm tenses up and just quits working.

Way back in college (believe me, that was a long time ago now) I had a friend who could play very fast. He had been playing for about the same number of years as I, but still had what I thought was unbelieveable speed. Based on that, I've come to the conclusion that there limits on how fast I will ever be.

Now that I am practicing more seriously though, I'm hoping to achieve new thresholds. The cool thing is that my left hand has no problem with any of the excersies at the speeds my right hand begins to break up so I think that I can focus on my right hand technique and improve my abilities tremendously.

One question that does come to mind is, How rapidly should I hope to achieve speed gains? When you look back in time Muris, did you find that your right hand picking reached a certain point very quickly or instead, did you observe speed improvements very slowly? For example, do you recall if in the early days of your practicing you had set certain goals of 100, 110, 120, 130 ... and did you have to work hard at each level to reach them?

That's what I've done for the short term. I've set a goal of 110 (versus my current 90) for most exercises in one years time. If I can achieve that, I want to keep working towards new goals, but if I've got some build in limit, I really would rather focus on something other than speed. I.e., developing my style and composition skills.

For now, keep the ap exercises and lessons coming and put plenty of backing tracks in for 90, 95, 100, & 105 speeds! :-)
Not sure how many times you've received this request, but if you still have the midi files, can you add a 95 bps speed to some of your existing lessons? ...like ap 3rds, rocking tune intermediate, & other ap lessons?

As always, I'm really grateful for this site and the world class contributors here. It's inspirational to parctice here and I'm seeing measurable gains in versatility & technique already in the two short months that I've been hanging around.

Great post James,thanks.

Being lefty and playing as right handed player
surely gives you the most problems in picking.
But just like everything else in life,
with enough practicing you'll overcome certain barriers speed wise,no worries.

As for me,back in the days I never watched tempo or bpm that much,
I was always focused on a goal and tried to get it,
without much thinking and with A LOT playing.
Perhaps I made some huge mistakes and waste lot of time
by doing things like that but I can't roll back the time.

So use metronome,try to pick as clean as possible
and don't look at the numbers too much,
numbers usually fright us with no reason,
16th notes at 150 is nothing if you play one single note all the time,right?

However I would like to track your progress
and so I'm asking you to share some video clips with me,
random exercises,regular lessons etc.
I'll try to help anyway I can.

Btw,there is a new rule among GMC stuff,
we are supposed to provide 4 tempo BTs for each section,
25%,50%,75% and 100%.
There was a poll and majority of members decided.

Cheers!!

I hope there are no lessons which 100% speed is 40 bpm then!

"Now, come on guys, let's play this! It's at 10 bpm! "

Hey guys Cool topic. I'd like to try and shed some light too..

I'm a lefty who plays right handed as well. Now, I don't claim to be extremely fast, but I can pretty easily handle 120bpm 16th note alternate picking. Legato has always been a friend to me, and in fact for a long time I only ever practiced ONE solid legato exercise, which is the lick at the end of Gabe's Neoclassical Sweeping and Legato lesson. This one has done wonders for me, the whole lesson is a great left hand exercise without being too tough on the right hand.

However, like you guys, for a long time I had a problem breaking some barriers with regards to my picking. So heres what I have done that has helped me a ton:

1) Learn to downpick only.

2) Learn to pick up only. A lot of people have a problem when it comes to AP because they're more focused on down or up picking, and it is unbalanced and leads to your brain getting confused and makes it harder to keep a rhythm steadily. For most people, the problem is up picking. Was for me too. Master it, learn to play with upstrokes only and then go back to AP. If you can do both up and down equally well, you're good.

3) repeating exercise patterns that force you to shift your pattern of up and down strokes. For example, most of the licks in Pavel's Hand Control Lesson. Lets look at one of them here:

E|---------14---------12---------|
B|-------------------------------|
G|-----11---------11-------------|
D|--9----------9-----------------|
A|-------------------------------|
E|-------------------------------|


The first one, looped. This kind of lick also includes string skipping, which makes it an even better exercise. The way this kind of exercise would be played by most people, you would have a power chord shape formed at least on the D and G strings. Another way to synchronize your hands together even more with this kind of exercise is to have your fretting fingers mute the two other strings you're not playing. Try not always fretting these "chord" notes, but muting them when they're not being played. This can be taken even further to help make a really cool "cut off note" effect when you get it down

[edit] Fixed the second link

Muris, I think there are two main things I can get from this...
1. Keep working at it.
2. Quit looking at how many ticks my metronome says and instead focus on making music.

I need to go out and get a web-cam now to record some of my playing and upload it. Not sure what you'll find except I'd be really interested in getting some feedback.

JVM, thanks for your advice as well. That reminds me that I need to work on starting ap runs with both upstroke and downstroke. I'll look into the lessons you recommend as well. Hey, knowing that you're lefty and can pick pretty quickly is great news too.

Ok, should I keep browsing these forums, or get back to practicing? ...hmmmm ... I think I know the answer to that one!

First one is fine,we ALL must keep working.
But second one isn't actually what I was trying to say.
Your metronome will always ticks 4 times unless you
use some odd time groove or som.

I was actually thinking of tempo.
90,120,170,doesn't matter,just practice until you get it right!

Looking forward to cam takes,
it's best way to analyze your playing and give some advices if possible.

Oh, yea, actually, I know what you mean four ticks per quarter note ... for sixteenths.
Actually, I have this really cool metronome on my computer that lets me set any number of subdivisions per quarter note. The metronome is freeware called "Tempo Perfect". If you google it, you can probably find it.
But, yea, I do plan to investigate a web-camera this weekend. When I record, I notice that it really makes me work hard to get a good take, making a video will probably do the same.

Today in my practice, I spent a lot of time with "alternate workout" and focusing on relaxing my right hand, & playing accurately. I can feel that it makes a difference. Not setting any new personal records for speed yet, but I felt more comfortable at my usual tempo.

Main thing is to feel comfortable while playing,
and if you feel comfortable you'll gain speed
even without noticing,trust me!

Looking forward to your takes,keep up the hard practicing.

Working on those takes now.
FYI, I posted a song that I did here TryItAgain.mp3 if you want to see "where I've been" with my guitar playing. From this I hope to transform my writing and playing to something new and more technically proficent.

Ok. Here are two takes of exercises that you will be familiar with.

I got my new video cam today so I've got a lot to learn about lighting & backdrops & getting the best sound. For now, I just put a set of headphones on the camcorder near the mic.

For the takes, I just recorded at a comfortable speed (i.e., slowly) . I did each on the first or second cut so that you could get an idea of how I really play. Let me know what you think, particularly of my right hand technique. I did miss a note here or two in the cuts. I'll work on that. One thing that recording yourself does is make you stop to observe what you're doing.

Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

Let me know what you think.

Jim.

Congrats on the camera,vids look more than great!

You picking hand is positioned just the way I like to see it,
slightly based on the bridge with fist closed,good job.
Now,there are few picking issues in first video-Alt 3ds.
Not sure if you noticed but you did small sweeps when
doing ascending part and so you started descending part
with an upstroke.
But you got away with it by repeating the same motion
in descending line so you started next ascending line
with a downstroke.
And this happens cause you picking hand still isn't
comfortable 100% to execute certain notes in here.
So I would suggest you to try it a bit slower,
do it with wider moves up and down,
to feel each note played by alternate picking.

You had no problems of this kind
in second video-Alt workout tho but it was kind a "there to happen"
cause your movements were pretty tight and short.
Of course it's good to keep them short and with
less effort as possible but go for wider moves at this point,
just to feel more natural when playing alternate picking.
It won't be possible with high tempos
of course so do it slower for few times.

Very good job so far,keep them coming!

Hi Muris ,

Now is my turn. I fell im stuck , I haven't seen any progress on my speed skills lately so tell me what you think about my technique.

Same excercies at 80 bpm and 100 bpm.

Click to view attachment

Click to view attachment

Thanks as always Muris.

Thanks Muris.
Ok. Today I worked on wider movements with the picking hand. I've got to say at these slower tempos, it is easy to do and gives a sense of feel for the timing. I'll keep working at this.

As for the string sweeping/skipping (when I should not be) , I'm going to work on that. With this excercise (alt 3rds) it's a little more difficult to make sure that each subsequent pick/pluck is different (i.e., down if previous was up, and up if previous was down). I gather that it is very important when picking fast to maintain this. The other excersice (alt workout) seems easier in this regard since the alternate picking is continuous and smooth. Both are great practice for me as is the C-minor Picking Etude. My routine for the past few weeks has been to warm up with these three, then go through each of the other ones on my list, then come back to these for more focus on alt picking. Each day, I spend some time learning a new lesson. I've got 14 on my favorites list as of now, and three new ones to be memorized which I keep bookmarked on GMC.

I'll get some more vids soon, but surely don't want to overwhelm you and the web with so many giga-bytes. Thanks again so much for the analysis. I think it will help.

Hey Coffeman, nice job! It's good to see someone working on the same stuff as I am. Stay with it.

Great takes coffeeman,just great!
The only thing you could do here to
improve yourself even more is to play
same thing on clean sound,with palm muting.
I'm saying this because you kind anchor
your pinky at pickguard,if that doesn't limit you
then you're on the right track !


JamesT,glad to hear that wider moves help you,
and don't hesitate to post more clips of your progress,
it's more than welcome,
I wish other members do that as well!

Thanks a lot Muris, I'll do it.

Anytime,keep me updated.